itors hath the same music at the same moment filling the
same sky!

Does the Lark ever sing in winter? Ay, sometimes January is visited with
a May-day hour; and in the genial glimpse, though the earth be yet barer
than the sky, the Lark, mute for months, feels called on by the sun to
sing, not so near to heaven's gate, and a shorter than vernal lyric, or
during that sweetest season when neither he nor you can say whether it
is summer or but spring. Unmated yet, nor of mate solicitous, in pure
joy of heart he cannot refrain from ascent and song; but the snow-clouds
look cold, and ere he has mounted as high again as the church-spire, the
aimless impulse dies, and he comes wavering down silently to the yet
unprimrosed brae.

In our boyish days, we never felt that the Spring had really come till
the clear-singing Lark went careering before our gladdened eyes away up
to heaven. Then all the earth wore a vernal look, and the ringing sky
said, "Winter is over and gone." As we roamed, on a holiday, over the
wide pastoral moors, to angle in the lochs and pools, unless the day
were very cloudy the song of some lark or other was still warbling
aloft, and made a part of our happiness. The creature could not have
been more joyful in the skies than we were on the greensward. We, too,
had our wings, and flew through our holiday. Thou soul of glee! who
still leddest our flight in all our pastimes--representative child of
Erin!--wildest of the wild--brightest of the bright--boldest of the
bold!--the lark-loved vales in their stillness were no home for thee.
The green glens of ocean, created by swelling and subsiding storms, or
by calms around thy ship transformed into immeasurable plains, they
filled thy fancy with images dominant over the memories of the steadfast
earth. The petterel and the halcyon were the birds the sailor loved, and
he forgot the songs of the inland woods in the moanings that haunt the
very heart of the tumultuous sea. Of that ship nothing was ever known
but that she perished. He, too, the grave and thoughtful English boy,
whose exquisite scholarship we all so enthusiastically admired, without
one single particle of hopeless envy--and who accompanied us on all our
wildest expeditions, rather from affection to his playmates than any
love of their sports--he who, timid and unadventurous as he seemed to
be, yet rescued little Marian of the Brae from a drowning death when so
many grown-up men stood aloof in selfish fea